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GLADYS KNIGHT & THE PIPS

It's all good and well to talk about the long run; abut hanging together, paying your dues and surviving. But it's quite another to have done it. In the world of popular music, longevity is a precious commodity...groups form, splinter, and re-form with predictable regularity, seeking some elusive combination that might spell success.
Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Gladys Knight and the Pips. With some groups counting themselves veterans after twenty-seven months, Gladys, her brother Bubba and cousins Ed and William have been singing, and surviving together for twenty-seven years.  That in itself is a statistic of some note: add to the fact that those twenty-seven years have witnessed some of the best most soulful and innovative music in the history of the medium and you have the makings of a legend. 
The legend of Gladys Knight and the Pips continues with their second release of Columbia Records, Touch. Produced, as was their Columbia debut About Love, by the hit-making team of Ashford and Simpson, Touch highlights by Nick and Val. It's an album that aptly demonstrates Gladys and the Pips' perennial appeal to modern audiences, an appeal evidence by SRO concert tours, international acclaim and a following that grows larger every year. Touch is tour force for one of  today's primary musical motivators, an album that builds on a longstanding and inexhaustibly creative career.
Hailing from Atlanta, Georgia, the group really had its beginnings the day Gladys was born. "We all came to the hospital to help bring Gladys home," recalls with a smile. The foursome first sang together at one of Bubba's birthday parties and from there graduated to church, teas and various family functions. Gladys, who remembers singing her first notes at age four, became a professional at the tender age of seven, after winning the $2,000 grand prize on Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour.

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